It’s kinda the elephant in the room. Everyone knows or guesses it’s there, but no one really knows what to say or if they should bring it up. But at some point someone either trips over it or inadvertently lets something slip. Because how can you not. Thanks a lot, George Lucas. Thanks for Star Wars and The Force.
I have a love/hate relationship to the whole Star Wars universe. Mostly love. The hate is more a grumbly annoyance on my professional side. I’m a sci/fi geek in my personal life and, having worked with engineers in the computer/software world for decades I have had the straight faced, no nonsense conversation about when to introduce children to Star Wars culture as a child rearing conundrum. And, just to be clear, this was not a one-on-one over the water cooler conversation, it happened often and in groups of 3-10 on average. There are now generations of parents who are passing this legacy on to their children. As the should. It’s the mythology of the 20th century right along with Star Trek, the Matrix, and the Terminator saga. Darth Vader is a far more relevant god figure than Hades and Princess Leia is a much more relatable one than Athena.
Star Wars and the others are great mythology because they speak to the themes of humanity just as the ancient religions did, just updated for the current culture. Questions of family, perception, morality, the power of the one, the power of the many, doing the right thing vs. the best thing, etc, etc, etc. It’s all there. And Star Wars, being the space 
opera that it is, takes it up a notch into the metaphysical with The Force and existence after bodily death. Which is where the hate comes in. Because, while popularizing the notion of energy that connects us, while making it part of our cultural lexicon to think of our elders watching over us and our being able to continue the communication, it also has trivialized it. Which makes the term ‘The Force’ the elephant in the room when someone asks me about the Akashics. I talk around it, refer to it obliquely, ignore it exists and just talk, but in the end, we all know it’s there. Sometimes I just use it in order to get it out in the open. Even worse, the term would be great if the people I was talking to were into Star Wars. But mostly they aren’t. So unfair.
So thank you, George Lucas, for putting the concept out there in a way that everyone gets and accepts and can even acknowledge. However, I retain the right to be Grumpy Cat about the after effects it has left me to deal with. And now, back to the conversation I was having with my friend about the fact that girls do not need pink light sabers…purists know Jedi’s prefer primary colors as it should be….
